In his Saturday column in the Times, Bill Keller spoke for all those at home
and abroad to put their faith in Secretary of State Colin Powell -- believing
he would persuade the President at the last minute to be satisfied with the
disarmament of Iraq, via the United Nations. Keller argues that Powell should
now resign his post, having failed in his diplomatic mission, to preserve what
credibility he has. I disagree with Keller only with his criticism of the role
played by France, as France only acted as it did when it realized Colin Powell
had given up on disarmament and threw in with the hawks on regime change. The
hawks, by the way, are now criticizing Powell for having talked the President
into going to the UN, where he suffered a defeat by getting only four votes of
15 for a new resolution endorsing war even while diplomacy was clearly
succeeding.

* * * * *

Why Colin Powell Should Go

March 22, 2003
By Bill Keller

The famous hardheaded definition of war
is "the continuation of politics by other means." In the real world,
though, war is the failure of politics. This war -- undertaken at such cost to
America's own interests -- is specifically a failure of Colin Powell's
politics.

Even if you believe that this war is justified, the route to it has been an
ugly display of American opportunism and bullying, dissembling and dissonance.
The administration has neglected other lethal crises around the world,
alienated the allies we need for almost everything else on our agenda and
abandoned friends working for the kind of values we profess to be exporting.

When the last insincere whimper of diplomacy failed this week, I happened to
be in Pakistan, where those who speak up for the values we espouse live with
death threats from Islamic zealots. As America moved on Iraq, it was
heartbreaking to hear the despair of these beleaguered liberals. They are
convinced that their cause -- our cause -- will now be suffocated by
anti-Americanism, not because we are going to war but because of the way we
are going to war.

Let's hope they are wrong, and let's hope the war is a quick success, and
let's hope President Bush can regain the good will that accrued to America
after September 11. But on the battleground of ideas -- on the issue of how
America uses its power -- Mr. Powell seems to me to have been defeated
already. When the war is over, when his departure will not undermine the
president during a high crisis, he should concede that defeat, and go.

I can't count the number of times in the past two years I've heard --
occasionally from my own lips -- the observation that the Bush Administration
would be a much scarier outfit without Colin Powell. Allied diplomats,
international businessmen and the American foreign policy mainstream have
regarded him as the lone grown-up in an administration with a teenager's
twitchy metabolism and self-centered view of the world. He was the one who
acknowledged that other countries had legitimate interests, and that in the
application of America's unmatched power there was a case for generosity
because what goes around comes around. His pragmatic caution offset a moralism
that sometimes verged on recklessness. If others, including the president,
seemed given to hype and swagger, Mr. Powell's word seemed bankable -- at
least until the White House began misspending his credibility in its rush to
the war that couldn't wait.

Even if you did not entirely share his soldier's wariness about military
intervention -- if, for example, you felt that he bore some of the
responsibility for our foot-dragging during the horrors of Bosnia -- you slept
better knowing he was there to assess the costs and give the alternatives
their due. He was the voice of moderation among the china-smashers. (Lowercase
c. At least, so far.)

For a time he managed to keep a lid on the new American exuberance. Our
relations with Russia and China weathered the early roughhousing over missile
defense and other disputes, in large part because Mr. Powell was such a
calming figure. Old-fashioned diplomacy helped line up the world's support for
our war in Afghanistan and the broader war on terror. Thanks to Mr. Powell we
(belatedly) framed our grievance against Iraq as a United Nations grievance;
that 15 to nothing vote on Resolution 1441 was probably the high-water mark of
his diplomacy. Mr. Powell also, I am told, helped beat back the idea of
fighting the war in Iraq on the cheap -- with fewer troops, more high-tech
dazzle, a little experiment with American lives. So he has won some big ones.

But that is exactly the problem. His formidable skills have been too much
engaged in a kind of guerrilla war for the soul of the president, and it has
shown. Critics in the administration and colleagues on this page have
unfavorably compared his performance in the buildup to war with James Baker's
whirlwind of global coalition-building before the gulf war in 1991. But Mr.
Baker was operating as his president's right arm; Mr. Powell was busy
protecting his right flank.

At least if the president had a secretary of state he fully trusted, the State
Department might be allowed to attend to the other grave problems it has given
short shrift: the flammable dispute between nuclear India and nuclear
Pakistan, the dangerously slow rebuilding of Afghanistan, the multiple woes of
South America and the toxic problem of North Korea's nuclear program. But Mr.
Powell and his department seem to operate always under a cloud of suspicion.
Even Mr. Powell's friend and deputy, Richard Armitage, a man with impeccable
Reaganite credentials, is sometimes treated as if he had morphed into Ramsey
Clark. (He had the audacity to say we would talk directly to North Korea.)
Despite Mr. Powell's efforts, the trove of expertise that resides in his
department has been marginalized. The State Department is apparently, as
Donald Rumsfeld might say, "old America."

Let us pray the combat is better planned and executed than the diplomacy of
the past few weeks, which managed to make the U.S. seem simultaneously
inflated and very small. The first U.N. resolution was coyly general in its
wording, but the second -- in all its misbegotten versions -- was simply
fraudulent, designed to cover up its real meaning, which was not disarmament
but regime change. As Mr. Powell was deployed time and again to dispense
credulity-straining information about our intelligence, about our purpose, I
kept thinking of the wised-up passages in his autobiography, when he deplored
the way Vietnam had eroded America's national conviction with "euphemism,
lies and self-deception." Then there was that silly tête-à-tête-à-tête
in the Azores -- an hour-long, pointless photo op that Mr. Powell, with a
straight face, insisted on calling "the Atlantic summit," as if it
were Yalta.

Perhaps the single saddest moment of the whole cynical prelude to war was Mr.
Bush's abrupt promise to take on the issue of Israel and Palestine, a
paramount and long-awaited commitment that was demeaned by the crassness of
timing. (Just in case anyone believed he was serious, the word quickly went
out from the White House that it was all intended to buy Tony Blair some peace
at home.)

And much as I respect Estonia and El Salvador, there is something ridiculous
about the list of our "partners" -- a coalition of the anonymous,
the dependent, the halfhearted and the uninvolved, whose lukewarm support
supposedly confers some moral authority. This is like -- oh, I don't know,
wresting a dubious election victory in Florida and claiming a mandate. It
lacks a certain verisimilitude.

Mr. Powell is not, of course, entirely to blame for the mess of the past few
months. If you're apportioning fault, you can cast plenty at the French for
demonstrating to the president that Mr. Powell's patient diplomacy was
pointless. We can blame Mr. Rumsfeld, the anti-diplomat, who dispensed insults
to uppity allies as if they were corporate subordinates. (Getting the
president a more compatible secretary of state might allow Mr. Rumsfeld to get
out of the business of undermining foreign policy and back to the business of
reforming the military.) We can blame the White House national security staff,
which is supposed to choreograph something resembling a coherent strategy. We
can, of course, blame the man at the desk where the buck stops.

The most important reason the secretary of state should go is that the
president has chosen a course that repudiates much of what Mr. Powell has
stood for -- notably his deep suspicion of arrogant idealism. I don't mean
that Mr. Bush is bent on a series of pre﷓emptive wars -- surely the
president would like to take the country into the election year at peace --
but this is about how we throw our weight around in peacetime, too.

Critics of the Bush administration talk about the breach in the Atlantic
alliance and the division at the United Nations as "collateral
damage," as if, in the rush to get Iraq, the administration has
blundered. That assumes it was an accident. It seems more plausible that this
was not an attempt to put spine in the United Nations and NATO, but to
discredit them. The global engineers talk with such contempt of these
organizations; it is difficult to believe they want to salvage them as
anything but appendages of American power.

The U.N. is indeed exasperating, and some of the international treaties
concocted during the cold war are indeed outdated. Surely the president is
right to conclude that if we see a genuine danger to our country, we are not
obliged to wait for the blessing of the Security Council to act. And even
granting the paradox that we made Saddam a bigger and more imminent danger by
broadcasting our determination to remove him, by the end we were trapped in
the reality that, left alone, he was a menace to us. Godspeed to the Third
Infantry, and good riddance to Saddam.

If you are going to demolish the old order, though, you should have something
in mind to replace it -- and so far, the replacement seems to be an endless
series of pickup games with America as owner of the football and, thus,
eternal quarterback.

Whatever you think of this idea (I think it is unsustainable), it demands a
high order of diplomatic dexterity to pull it off. Not much of that finesse
has been in evidence as our leaders have cast about desperately for followers,
shifting from one rationale to another, bribing and browbeating, citing
questionable intelligence and dubious legalisms.

When I put the question of resigning to Mr. Powell yesterday, he was,
characteristically, showing no signs of surrender. He has no intention of
leaving, he said. He has the president's full confidence. He has been written
off before. And Iraq is just Iraq -- not the first in a series of military
adventures.

"I think it's a bit of an overstatement to say that now this one's
pocketed, on to the next place," Mr. Powell said. The larger question of
America's role in the world, he said, "isn't answered yet."

Such a loyal and optimistic man would make some president a great secretary of
state. Just not this president.